1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) systems. More particularly, the present invention provides a method, system, and computer program product for completion coalescing by a TCP receiver (e.g., in a TCP/IP offload engine (TOE)).
2. Related Art
As known in the art, TCP is a data transfer protocol that uses acknowledgement and timeout mechanisms to provide reliable services. To this extent, TCP assigns a sequence number to each byte transmitted, and expects a positive acknowledgement (ACK) from the receiving TCP. If the TCP ACK is not received within a timeout interval, the data is retransmitted. Other, more advanced retransmit schemes are also used, which allow the retransmit process to start upon reception of multiple (e.g., three) duplicated ACKS (a duplicated ACK is an ACK which does not change the left window edge of a TCP window).
The use of the acknowledgement mechanism is based on sending dedicated TCP ACK segments, or piggy-backing TCP ACK information in the TCP headers of data segments. However, processing of dedicated TCP ACK segments or piggy-backed TCP ACK information is a clear overhead to the network. One way that TCP attempts to reduce this overhead is by using a delayed TCP ACK approach. This approach allows a single TCP ACK to be sent for each two (or more) received TCP segments.
Additional TCP ACK processing overhead arises from the completion processing of each received TCP ACK segment or data segment carrying new TCP ACK information. As known in the art, such completion processing involves, for example, the reading and processing of a posted consumer request (e.g., descriptors read), to identify whether this request has been completed or not. A major problem with TCP, is that TCP does not provide a simple way to map TCP sequence numbers to consumer requests. In InfiniBand, for example, an acknowledgement segment carries not only a byte sequence number, but also a message sequence number. This allows ACK processing and completion handling to be performed without the need to gather information to perform ACK SN— to consumer request mapping. In TCP, however, an ACK does not carry such information. As such, in TCP, information must be gathered to perform ACK SN— to—consumer request mapping. One way to gather the required information involves the reading and processing of consumer requests. Therefore, performing such time consuming operations for each received TCP ACK both consumes network and processing resources and forces the logic processing of inbound TCP segments to wait for the completion processing of each received TCP ACK to finish, before processing the next TCP segment. Thus, the completion processing overhead comprises two parts: the overhead of the completion operation itself; and the coupling of inbound TCP segment processing logic with completion processing logic.
There is a need, therefore, for a method, system, and computer program product for processing inbound TCP segments (including ACKS) independently from completion processing. This allows the processing of inbound TCP segments to continue without waiting for the completion processing of each received TCP ACK to finish. Also, the delayed, separate completion processing allows the present invention to perform coalescing of ACKS (i.e., one completion operation may be performed for multiple ACKS, instead of one completion operation per ACK). The same approach may also be applied to the completion processing of RDMA Read Requests.